The use of data storage devices has become ubiquitous in homes as well as businesses. Demand for higher performance as well as flexibility and expandability provides a challenging environment with currently available solutions. Home applications require user friendly attachment and simple expansion for increasing storage capacity and/or performance. Add-on storage, such as external desktop drives, network attached drives, and portable hard drives are widely used for storage of home entertainment, photos, and home office applications. Home entertainment such as Digital Video Recorders (DVR), expanders, and media players push data storage requirements and performance speeds higher.
As the demands for expandability and higher performance grow, communications channels have increased their speed and in some cases outpaced the ability of storage devices to provide all the performance that might otherwise be achieved.
Newer communication channels have advanced to be able to communicate in two directions at the same time, for example, writing data and reading data simultaneously over a single connection. In home entertainment applications such as DVR's this is useful, for example, when recording one program while watching another program at the same time.
Current storage solutions that incorporate storage devices, such Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Solid State Drives (SSD), or semiconductor memories may limit performance or expandability since they are limited by the underlying devices they contain.
The products that incorporate underlying storage devices, or attach to storage devices are called bridges.
Bridges may be stand alone devices incorporating underlying storage, such as a DVR or desktop storage used for direct attachment to a computer. In some cases, the bridge is provided and the user provides data storage to be attached to the bridge. Some bridges incorporate storage and also allow for additional external storage.